Garden History Society » Book Reviews

John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity

Charles Boot — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:50:28 +0000

Gillian Darley, John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), xiv + 383 pp., illus. in black-and-white, £25.00 (hbk), ISBN 0-300-11227-0

John Evelyn was a giant of his era, and his era was a most momentous one. Gillian Darley has an extensive stage and a cast of thousands to work with in this new biography, which takes its place as a wide-ranging introduction to his life and work. Evelyn’s eighty-five years spanned the reigns of five monarchs, as well as the Civil War and the Interregnum. He went abroad in the 1640s to avoid the trouble, spending time in the Low Countries, France, and Italy and returning for a longer stay in Paris in the early 1650s, all the time observing and storing up memories for later use. For instance, he visited the Château of Maisons twice and wrote of its riverside garden, where the banks were cut ‘like a Harbour or Bay into a part of the Garden’. He suggested (unsuccessfully) introducing this idea at Greenwich and Chelsea, both with riverside gardens.

Back in England in 1652, he set about developing his own garden at Sayes Court, Deptford in Kent. We hear in parallel of the new planning of the garden at Wotton in Surrey, Evelyn’s birthplace and the family home, which was inherited by his elder brother, George. While George and another George, a cousin, made plans, Evelyn took an advisory role. He discussed plants and garden design extensively with friends and contacts, but rarely did more than visit and advise. One of the exceptions, and his surviving masterpiece, was Albury Park, Surrey, designed for his friend, George Howard, and inspired in particular by the huge terraces of Palestrina (ancient Praeneste) outside Rome. Darley comments that the chronology of Albury is difficult to unravel, but suggests that Evelyn’s detailed plan, which she dates to 1673, is perhaps an idealized version of his intentions. More information would be welcome for this important commission.

Evelyn’s interests were so wide, and he knew and corresponded with so many people, that it is difficult to keep up with him. Not surprising, then, that some of his projects remained unfinished. This is the case with his famous treatise on gardens, Elysium Britannicum. He worked on it extensively during the Commonwealth years, and intended to publish it to mark the Restoration, but somehow he never did. However, he achieved twenty published works on subjects as varied as London’s polluted air, architecture and printmaking. Gardening dominates and the titles include two translations from the French, as well as his own writings.

Darley’s book has a freshness which derives in part from the author’s own enthusiasm but, also, from newly revealed information in the Evelyn archive, deposited at the British Library in 1995 and now online and catalogued. The very amount of material there — 227 volumes of Evelyn’s own papers — means that the author has had to be very selective, and we are sometimes only given tantalising glimpses, but his family, friends and contacts emerge much more clearly than before. The achievement of this account then, written with deep knowledge and great skill, lies in setting the man, with all his interests, in the context of his uncertain and fascinating times.

Sally Jeffery

35:1 (Summer 2007)

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Strange Blooms: The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants

Charles Boot — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:46:34 +0000

Jennifer Potter, Strange Blooms: The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants (London: Atlantic, 2006), xxix + 464 pp., illus. in colour and black-and-white, £19.99 (hbk), ISBN 1-84354-334-6

This necessary and timely book, which restores the Tradescants to their place in history after the ‘racey’ makeover they were given in the 1990s, is hugely enjoyable.* Jennifer Potter has an engaging style, which carefully documents the lives of the John Tradescants, father and son, who remain of such peculiar interest that in just over twenty years they have had two biographies and a historical novel written about them. In contrast to Philippa Gregory’s earlier historical novel, through Potter’s meticulous research in England and Jamestown, Virginia, we now know that the Younger John Tradescant did not make more than one journey to Virginia.

John Tradescant the Elder gardened for the most prominent, the First Minister Robert Cecil and for the Stuart favourite the Duke of Buckingham, and throughout these times he made numerous and extensive plant buying trips to the Continent. It was the John Tradescant the Younger who went to Virginia, but his father who had set the pace, plant foraging, first north to Archangel in 1618, then with the Duke of Buckingham on his ill-fated naval expeditions to Algiers and La Rochelle. Following Buckingham’s assassination Tradescant the Elder was employed by Charles I as gardener and keeper of the royal vines and silk worms. Tradescant the Younger gardened and collected with his father and took over his position with Queen Henrietta Maria at Oatlands Palace, Surrey. He voyaged to Virginia in 1637, from where he returned with two hundred specimens, not all new, including Liriodendron tulipifera and Taxodium distichum.

In spite of this intrepid venture and his acknowledged gardening skills, he does not present as the considerable person who his father was — and neither did he to his father’s friends. One such, John Morris, who had had great regard for the Tradescant the Elder, described his son in 1638 as skilled in gardening matter, but as ‘unschooled and obviously uncivilised’. The Tradescants amassed collections of ornamental flowers and trees, most notably fruit trees, and a catalogue was published in 1634. In an age of discovery, the new and diverse were highly desired and the Elder Tradescant introduced many varieties from the Continent. To these botanical collections was added a hoard of rarities, natural, manmade and fanciful curiosities, rare birds, gems and coins, poisoned arrows, Henry VIII’s hawking bag and spurs, a salamander, and the hand of a mermaid. Collected from all over the known world these were in the catalogue of 1656. Alas the plight of this collection and the manoeuvrings of that perfidious lawyer Elias Ashmole, who was first indispensable to the publication, and later resorted to skulduggery and litigation to wrest the collection from the family. Hestor Tradescant, the surviving widow, drowned herself.

As a consequence of Ashmole’s action, and the installation of the collection in a museum named after the lawyer, the Tradescants became known primarily as royal gardeners, as emphasized by the title of Prudence Leith-Ross’s biography, Gardeners to the Rose and Lily Queen (1984).** But Potter cites the work of the principal royal gardener and designer, André Mollet, in quotations from the parliamentary inventories of Oatlands and other royal gardens taken during the Interregnum. These are extraordinary reading, but they are the work of Mollet the Royal Gardener, not the Tradescants. Their lives revolved around the acquisition and propagation of plants and procuring rarities and they were the first to open a museum to the public, Tredeskins Ark in South Lambeth. There amongst marvels of sea shells, fossils, crystals, beasts, birds, fishes, snakes and insects could be found Powhatan’s ‘habit’ and a stuffed dodo. It is their entitlement to this historic role as collectors that was so successfully obscured by Ashmole, and now reinstated by Potter.

Potter does address the Tradescants’ reputations as gardeners and plantsmen, putting them, most notably Tradescant the Elder, securely within the plant, and increasingly the botanic, world of the time. John Parkinson and John Gerard were good friends of the Elder Tradescant, and the much younger diarist John Evelyn became a mutual friend of the Morin family in Paris, again nurserymen and collectors and with whom the Tradescants exchanged plants over the years. Some of these plants were listed by the Elder Tradescant in his copy of his friend John Parkinson’s book, Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris … (London, 1629). Throughout Potter’s book there are glorious plant lists of exotic and rare fruits, countless different cherries and apples, tulips, anemones and a host of flowers, and there are lists too of what to take on the voyage to Virginia. The wealth of detail surrounding the Tradescants and their contemporaries portrays the society of plantsmen, collectors, and intrepid explorers in the seventeenth century and makes for an absorbing and informative book, a treasury for anyone with a glancing interest in English social history.

Rosemary Lamont

* Philippa Gregory, Virgin Earth (London: HarperCollins, 1999).

** Prudence Leith-Ross, The John Tradescants Gardeners to the Rose and Lily Queen (London: Peter Owen, 1984).

35:1 (Summer 2007)

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Icons of Twentieth Century Landscape Design

Charles Boot — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:38:02 +0000

Katie Campbell, Icons of Twentieth Century Landscape Design (London: Frances Lincoln, 2006), 176 pp., illus. in colour and black-and-white, £30.00 (hbk), ISBN 0-711-22533-8

Katie Campbell, a postgraduate researcher in garden history, has chosen twenty-nine landscapes in Europe, North and South America and has built these into lively and searching case studies of changing attitudes to the moulding of spaces around buildings in the twentieth century. There is a wide range of types and scales of sites, which includes industrial, funereal, park, museum and monumental associations, many of which are open to the public. Most are well known to the interested explorer of twentieth-century design — Guevrekian’s Villa Noailles at Hyères, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Thomas Church’s Dewey Donnell Garden and Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, for instance – but there are less prominent examples, such as Brenda Colvin’s Eggborough Power Station and José Luis Sert’s Maeght Foundation. Several built features have only their own, non-green landscapes, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion and Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, DC. The small but significant gardens of Martha Schwartz (Bagel Garden) and Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, have been included.

Campbell explains in her Introduction that the examples are linked to the changes in twentieth-century social, political and cultural history, which have ‘pushed the boundaries’ and challenged ‘assumptions about the form, use and meaning of landscape’ away from the dominant conservative attitudes of recent times. Each site is explored in depth, its landscape architect placed in his/her own historical context, and the landscape related to the ideas and philosophies which influenced their maker. Christian and non-Christian symbolism melding with nature formed the Woodland Cemetery at Enskede in Stockholm. Communal living was a key factor in the building of the Maeght Foundation in St-Paul-de-Vence, though this ideal was eventually abandoned. Colvin’s 1947 warning about the damaging ecological consequences of man’s activities on the planet must have been uppermost in her mind as she designed her Yorkshire power station in 1962. Isamu Noguchi’s garden in the UNESCO building in Paris is described as ‘a very personal combination of Japanese philosophy and modernist aesthetics’. Martha Schwartz, a follower of Noguchi, was able to make a name for herself by exposing the ‘staid and predictable’ nature of American landscape architects by poking fun at them in a garden decorated with the perishable bagel.

The poetry and preoccupation with war in the pastoral setting of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta and Charles Jencks’s evolving explanations about his scientific approach to his Garden of Cosmic Speculation are expanded and carefully explained. The book draws to a close with a perceptive appreciation of the landscape around Daniel Libeskind’s startling and shocking Jewish Museum in Berlin.

Campbell has visited many of the sites, and clearly much research has underpinned the case studies. It is a pity, however, that she does not acknowledge any of her sources, and does not include a bibliography. For the student of landscape it is important to be able to follow up primary material, and to separate the anecdotal from the factual. Who made the ‘many imitations’ of Jarman’s garden? Campbell repeats the myth about an American oak which is supposed to produce flame-red leaves at the Kennedy Memorial at Runnymede at the anniversary of his assassination. Can Bentley Wood really be considered a Christopher Tunnard garden? Serge Chermayeff had laid out the greater part, only leaving Tunnard some flowerbeds to construct. Neither did Tunnard ‘create a modern British landscape style’ for Bentley Wood — or anywhere else. Though exasperated by British resistance to Modernism, he was unable to devise a modernist style himself — in common with Le Corbusier at Villa Savoye. Generalizations such as ‘European formality’ are misleading: the Dutch and the Germans have produced ‘natural’ landscapes which owe their creation to their concentration on horticulture. It is also a pity that none of the recent horticulturists who use trees, shrubs and plants in an architectural manner — such as the Spaniard Fernando Caruncho — has been included here. And sadly, there are too many embarrassing errors in the spelling of the names of sites and makers.

Janet Waymark

35:1 (Summer 2007)

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Baroque Garden Cultures: Emulation, Sublimation, Subversion

Charles Boot — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:32:54 +0000

Michel Conan (ed.), Baroque Garden Cultures: Emulation, Sublimation, Subversion (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2005), 433 pp., illus. in black-and-white, £32.95 (hbk), ISBN 0-884-02304-4

That gardens once had significant cultural roles and meanings should be obvious to all save the most blinkered and obtuse. It is also true that gardens played an important part in the evolution of the Baroque in Europe: Baroque attitudes to past and future cultures attempted synthesis in a truly heroic attempt to link the diversity of historical cultural forms into a newly integrated whole. This aspect of Baroque art and design can be compared only with the Hellenistic and Roman syntheses of ancient and disparate cultures (as, for example, at the Villa Adriana, Tivoli), and it is arguable that the Baroque syntheses were altogether deeper, more comprehensive, and impressive even than those of Antiquity.* In many Baroque gardens are found aspects of garden-design as compendia, in which, compressed within their boundaries, are encyclopaedias of references, vast canvases of diverse historical, symbolic, allegorical, mythological, and artistic meanings, all combined in delightful, enchanting wholes. In them may be discovered one epoch inserted within another, reminders of Christian and pagan religions, the exotic, visions of Paradise, and much else, a huge combination with an almost infinite variety of cultural and mythological allusions, mnemonic triggers, and much, much more. The fully fledged Baroque garden is a Gesamtkunstwerk in which there can be found a creative tension in the synthesis and fusion of Antique architectural forms, ruins, the exotic (often Orientalizing buildings), allusions to Classical mythology and history, esoteric legends, and elaborate geometries into a new entity reflecting, perhaps, the whole of the known world, and not just the world one can or could see, but the world of the spirit and mind as well. This is an example of the Historia Universalis so essential to grasp in any attempt to understand much of what went on in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a limited and impoverished modernist viewpoint is wholly unequipped to be able to begin to understand this phenomenon.**

Baroque Garden Cultures is essentially a study of how Baroque gardens were received and perceived by their contemporaries and, indeed, how the reception of historical gardens has changed over the centuries, even considering how modern tourists and critics might view them today. The book grew out of a Symposium on the ‘Social Reception of Baroque Gardens’ at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC, in 2001, so there are several contributors. Michel Conan’s Introduction, entitled ‘The new horizons of Baroque garden cultures’, sets out the argument for a study of the social reception of gardens as a step in renewing our understanding of garden culture. Erik A. de Jong discusses reception and exchange of ideas in Northern European garden culture, 1648–1725, particularly through individuals, trade, books, prints, and so on, by which widespread emulation occurred, connected with a display of royal will and aristocratic noblesse oblige. He correctly identifies commerce and displays of political power as potent agents in the dissemination of ideas, motifs, and designs. Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi describes gardens of knowledge and the spread of cultural agendas, and there are other erudite contributions by Tracy L. Ehrlich, Magnus Olausson, Roland Puppe, Margherita Azzi Visentini, Stephen H. West, Lance Neckar, and Conan again. Particularly enjoyable is Puppe’s intelligent essay on ‘Saxon Baroque gardens (1694–1733)’, that is the reign of the remarkable Elector Friedrich August I, ‘The Strong’, who was King of Poland 1697–1706 and again from 1710.

This book is, Laus Deo!, not only interesting, but also very readable, largely free from the absurd and pretentious obfuscatory prose affected by certain so-called ‘academics’. It would have been more useful, however, if the rudimentary index was a lot more comprehensive, and if a bibliography had been included, rather than tucked away in the footnotes (the last, mercifully, are where they ought to be — on the appropriate pages).

For any student of the Baroque, this volume, with its wide-ranging subject matter, will prove to be a fascinating trawl through Baroque garden culture, plants, planting, gardening and gardeners, printed sources, botanical gardens as aspects of science and the acquisition of knowledge, pastoral landskips, social politics, Swedish Baroque gardens, gardens as essential extensions of palaces for entertainment in the glorious world of August der Stärke, shifting perceptions of the Borromean islands of delight on Lake Maggiore, friendship and imagination in French Baroque gardens before 1661, anger and awe in the Baroque landskip at Castle Howard, North Yorkshire, and even a foray into spectacle, ritual, and social relations in Imperial gardens in the Northern Song*** of China in which the garden is seen as a place that accumulated various forms of complex social relations between and among all classes in a sort of ‘sediment of experience and memory’, not unlike Baroque gardens in fact. And memory, really, is at the heart of the matter: if we understand that, we are getting somewhere.

James Stevens Curl

* Igor Doukhan, ‘Baroque city: the conception of time and history’, Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis, 21 (2001), pp. 263–75.

** Jan A. M. Snoek, Monika Scholl and Andréa A. Kroon (eds), Symbolik in Gärten des 18.Jahrhunderts: der Einfluss unterschiedlicher philosophischer Strömungen (The Hague: OVN, 2006), pp. 35–67. Also Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica Universalis: Eine Modellgeschichte humanistischer und barocker Wissenschaft (Hamburg: Meiner, 1983).

*** Also ‘Sung’, the name of the dynasty that ruled China from AD960 to 1279. The Northern Song had as its capital (AD960–1125) Bianliang (modern Kaifeng).

35:1 (Summer 2007)

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Experiencing the Garden in the Eighteenth Century

Charles Boot — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:24:51 +0000

Martin Calder (ed.), Experiencing the Garden in the Eighteenth Century (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 251 pp., illus. in black-and-white, £34.00 (pbk), ISBN 3-03910-291-5

This volume comprises a collection of diverse papers presented at a one-day international conference held at the Institute of Romantic Studies, University of London, in 2004. Two of the essays, those by Michel Baridon (‘Understanding nature and the aesthetics of the landscape garden’) and Jean-Marcel Humbert (‘Egypt in the eighteenth-century garden: decline or revival of the initiatory journey?’*), were given in French, and the editor has translated them into English, not entirely successfully, for Antinou?s (c.AD110–30),** the Bithynian ‘favourite’ (as he if often coyly referred to elsewhere) of Hadrian (emperor AD117–38),*** is unaccountably called ‘she’ (unless this is, perhaps, a camp joke, though I doubt it). Calder himself was responsible for one of the papers (‘Promenade in Ermenonville’). The other contributors are Katherine Myers (‘Visual fields: theories of perception and the landscape garden’), Katja Grillner (‘Experience as imagined: writing the eighteenth-century landscape garden’), David L. Hays (‘Figuring the commonplace at Ermenonville’), David Maskill (‘Death in a French garden: the Laborde and Cook monuments at Méréville and the landscape of loss’*** *), Renata Tyszczuk (‘Nature intended: the garden of a roi bienfaisant’), and David Jacques and Tim Rock (‘Pierre-Jacques Fougeroux: a Frenchman’s commentary on English gardens of the 1720s’). There are footnotes, a list of the somewhat dimly reproduced illustrations, and an inadequate index.

Otherwise, the book is a pleasure to read: obfuscation has been eschewed, clarity reigns supreme, and generally the prose is worthy of the subject-matter, blessedly free from pseudery and pretentiousness, and for this presumably the editor can mostly be thanked. The authors correctly point to the eighteenth-century garden as providing a series of pictorial experiences to be enjoyed by visitors as they walked through it: and there was more to it than that, for a perambulator would have his or her thoughts triggered by images, be they fabriques or compositions, so on every hand there were allusions to history, mythology, and much else, prompting memory, emotions, appreciation of aesthetics, and even sombre considerations of Death itself, for even in a beautiful garden, even in Arcady, Death was ever-present.*** **

However, the visitor to an eighteenth-century garden was not only a spectator, but also an actor, himself or herself part of the changing compositions. Eighteenth-century gardens were intended by their creators as places where meaning was carefully encoded, often by indirect references or allusions. The various scenes or episodes within gardens, notably where there were what the French call fabriques, were intended to trigger responses in those who experienced them.

Rather curiously, as the references make clear, this rather pricey volume omits many significant contributions to the subject which have been in the public domain for some years: this hints at some of its limitations, and it is a pity the papers were not augmented and revised so that an altogether more substantial volume might have emerged. As it is, it must be regarded as an introduction to a vast subject, readable, but in parts curiously insubstantial, which is a pity, for what material it contains is reasonably sound and enjoyable, as well as being digestible and agreeable.

As Calder observes, though, gardens ‘must be experienced at first hand in order to be fully appreciated’: ‘the garden cannot be taken to the viewer; rather the viewer must go to the garden’. Nevertheless, all gardens change, and some decay beyond recall: the other huge problem today is that few persons are mentally or culturally equipped to read them when they visit them, for the poverties of modern education and understanding really preclude any meaningful grasp of the subtleties intended. That is why scholarship is vitally necessary in order to interpret, explain, and reveal the riches of such places that could well prove ephemeral without care, thought, and real expertise. It is sobering that some blinkered commentators have dismissed certain fabriques that display (for those who care to look) solutions to over thirty technical problems associated with bridge-building as merely work-relief schemes for disbanded soldiers. The modern mind is clearly ill-equipped to understand exemplary demonstrations, yet in the Age of the Enlightenment civilised persons believed that in order to effect improvements and raise tone as part of Man’s Regeneration, a garden was as good a place as any in which to start.*** ***

James Stevens Curl

* L’Égyptomanie à l’épreuve de l’archéologie (Brussels: Du Gram, and Paris: Musée du Louvre, 1996), esp. pp. 347–65.

** For Antinou?s and Hadrian, see James S. Curl, The Egyptian Revival: Ancient Egypt as the Inspiration for Design Motifs in the West (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005).

*** Anthony R. Birley, Hadrian; The Restless Emperor (London: Routledge, 1997).

*** * James S, Curl, ‘Young’s Night Thoughts and the origins of the garden cemetery’, Journal of Garden History, 14(2) (1994), pp. 92–118.

*** ** James S. Curl, ‘Symbolism in eighteenth-century gardens: some observations’, in Symbolik in Gärten des 18. Jahrhunderts: der Einfluss unterschiedlicher philosophischer Strömungen, wie auch der Freimaurerei [Stichting ter bevordering van wetenschappelijk Onderzoek naar de geschiedenis van de Vrijmetselarij in Nederland] (The Hague: OVN, 2006), pp. 25–67.

*** *** For expositions on this theme, see Peter H. Currie (ed.), Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 116 (2004), pp. 83–126.

35:1 (Summer 2007)

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Sculpture and the Garden

Charles Boot — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:14:04 +0000

Patrick Eyres and Fiona Russell (eds), Sculpture and the Garden (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 196 pp., 85 black-and-white illus., 16 colour illus., £60.00 (hbk), ISBN 0-754-63030-7

Sculpture can focus attention and add layers of meaning and expression to parks and gardens in varying ways. The particular significance may well change from one period to another, with some sculptures having a limited time for their message. It is, accordingly, a challenging subject, yet the study of sculpture in the garden has received less critical attention than other elements. This book sets out in some measure to rectify the situation. It comprises a series of essays based on a conference held at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, in 1998. The contributors come from various backgrounds — university teaching, gallery curating, the Parks Agency and freelance research and writing — which provides a number of different approaches to the subject. Part 1 covers ‘The Georgian Landscape Garden and Victorian Urban Park’; Part 2 ‘Modernism, Postmodernism, Landscape and Regeneration’. Such a division enables the reader to appreciate the enormous and radical differences in the form and role of sculpture in the garden or landscape pre- and post- the First World War.

Each part starts with an introduction by the two editors, which admirably encapsulates the purpose and essence of sculpture in the two respective periods. It is regrettable that the first essay itself has no place in the book. It considers Studley Royal, West Yorkshire, as a sculpted landscape, which even the author admits could apply to any landscape garden. Although there is some thought-provoking sculpture per se at Studley Royal, this is ignored, a lacuna that the editors have quietly filled in their introduction. A case is made out for William Kent as the designer responsible, for which there is no shred of evidence. The author’s argument is based on Kent’s designs for gardens elsewhere, which is hardly convincing. After this blip, however, we are into sculpture proper. The representation of George I, with its implications of establishing the Hanoverians, is considered, to be followed by Wendy Frith looking from a gender and political perspective at the Venus de Medici in the landscape garden, returning to territory she has covered before.* Strangely, she omits reference to a paper on the same subject which, although it appeared after the 1998 conference, came out six years ago.**

The final pair of essays in Part 1 deals with public statues in Victorian parks, one in the Manchester region, the other a more general disquisition on the heterogeneity of such sculpture, which is by no means confined to promulgating a single, readily comprehensible set of Victorian ethics. As one would expect from David Lambert, this is a fresh and insightful piece.

In Part 2 another set of five essays covers a case study of Henry Moore’s Recumbent Figure (1938), made for Bentley Wood, Sussex, though it has subsequently belied its recumbent posture and travelled; modern sculpture in the public park (‘A Socialist Experiment in Open-Air “Cultured Leisure”’); Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture collection at St Ives, Cornwall; forest and garden sculpture parks and trails; and the late Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta near Edinburgh. This furnishes a good range of modern and postmodern approaches to creating and experiencing sculpture in the garden — also to redefining what sculpture is. The authors have a feeling for their chosen topics and can communicate it.

The span of the book, with its contrasts and changes of focus from close-up to wide-angle, enables plenty of interesting material to be covered, with perceptive contributions from the vari-talented team of authors. It does not purport to be in any sense a history of sculpture in gardens, yet one comes away with an understanding of the great differences between traditional and modern by following the historical route through. At £60, however, the book is grossly overpriced. For the size and quality of production and, in comparison with other illustrated works on garden history, one would have expected to pay half that sum. Unfortunately, this means that the final recommendation must be for readers to borrow rather than purchase it.

Michael Symes

* For example, New Arcadian Journal, 49–50 (2000).

** David Coffin, ‘Venus in the eighteenth-century English garden’, Garden History, 28:2 (2000), pp.175–93

35:1 (Summer 2007)

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The ‘Chinese Garden in Good Taste’: Jesuits and Europe’s Knowledge of Chinese Flora and Art of the Garden in the 17th and 18th Centuries

Charles Boot — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:05:58 +0000

Bianca Maria Rinaldi, The ‘Chinese Garden in Good Taste’: Jesuits and Europe’s Knowledge of Chinese Flora and Art of the Garden in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Munich: Martin Meidenbauer, 2006), illus., €42.00 (hbk), ISBN 3-899-75041-1

This publication is the second from the Centre of Garden Art and Landscape Architecture, founded in June 2002, at the University of Hanover, and the first that I have reviewed that contains instructions for cooking a peppered flamingo! The work is the outcome of the author’s extensive and detailed research for her doctoral thesis on the Jesuits’ writings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries concerning Chinese flora and gardens. The author points out that much of the previous writing on the topic has been the result of a fragmented approach, and that this publication is the result of a more comprehensive consideration of the surviving literature.

The initial chapters deal with the organization of the Jesuits in Far East Asia and how they used science as a tool for the propagation of the Catholic faith. There are some fascinating insights into how the Jesuits’ use of botanical knowledge was seen as a means to gain access to those with power and influence, including the Emperor’s court. The author describes the Jesuits as ‘the fulcrum of true cultural exchange’ between two civilisations that appeared so apparently different to each other. A summary of European knowledge concerning the Asiatic flora during the sixteenth century, and the political and commercial expansion which occurred in the seventeenth century form the basis of Part I. The early appreciation of Eastern plants for their pharmacological and culinary uses is traced back to the Greek and Roman trade with Asia, and it is from the Roman writer Apicius that the reader is given an insight into preparing flamingo with the addition of ground pepper. It was fascinating to learn that, as early as 1652, a garden was established on the Cape of Good Hope, to offer a place for the temporary acclimatization of Asian plants, since long sea voyages had a detrimental effect on the seeds, bulbs and plants destined for Europe.

The relevant herbals, treatises, and other writings compiled by the Jesuits are examined in Part II, and a detailed account shows how a knowledge of plants and their cultivation, and use in gardens reached Europe. These historical accounts range from botanical illustrations of rhubarb in the seventeenth century to reports in the early eighteenth on the decorative use of lotus in the garden ponds of China. A particularly interesting example is given of how the Jesuits introduced the Chinese to new plants as a means of gaining favour, the sensitive plant (Mimosa pudica) being very successful with the Emperor Qianlong.

In Part III attention is turned to the Jesuits’ contribution to European knowledge concerning the gardens of China. The author, from her extensive studies of contemporary accounts, is able to highlight how the Jesuits’ assessments of gardens changed over time as their appreciation and understanding evolved. However, it is made clear that there were aspects of garden design in China that the Jesuits found challenging, including the expenditure on naturally shaped rock and the lack of ornamentation given to water features.

This is a book for the academic or those with a deep enthusiasm and interest in Chinese flora and gardens. The maxim ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ has never been more applicable than to this publication; presumably the cover design (plain blue with the title) follows the house style for the series, but for a wider audience it would have been helpful to use some of the black and white illustrations discussed and shown from the various Jesuit treatises.

The author is both an architect and a landscape architect, and holds the post of Assistant Professor at the Institute of Landscape Architecture for the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna, and her scholarship is clearly displayed. There are balanced and useful explanations, and the quality and depth of research is the great strength of this book. Sources of the wide-ranging primary data are carefully referenced allowing the dedicated scholar to find the originals. Occasionally, however, the text still reads as a dissertation, particularly when detailed justifications are given for why the work was undertaken, and at times I wished the illustrations were nearer the relevant text. However, these are minor points and though not a light read the text adds considerably to our understanding of the cross-cultural exchange that occurred, and of how China was perceived. This is summarized by the author: It is without doubt thanks to the works of the Jesuits that China, in the eyes of Europeans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, assumed its position among the great countries of the world.

Jill Raggett
Writtle College, Chelmsford

35:1 (Summer 2007)

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Der malerische Landschaftspark in Laxenburg bei Wien

Charles Boot — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:59:42 +0000

Géza Hajós (ed.), Der malerische Landschaftspark in Laxenburg bei Wien (Vienna: Böhlau, 2006), 365 pp., illus. in colour and black-and-white, €69.00 (hbk), ISBN 3-205-77444-2

Laxenburg is, alongside Schönbrunn, the second most important historic designed landscape in Austria, and this book is the most in-depth monograph of any within the country thus far. Situated near Vienna, this formerly imperial park and garden was originally a Habsburg hunting ground surrounding a medieval castle. However, after it had been connected with a straight avenue to Schönbrunn, the convenient new route led to its increased status as an imperial residence, and soon after the focus was on the gardens. In the 1750s, a Baroque layout was cut through existing woodland. The most significant phase however was the jardin anglais that was initiated after Emperor Joseph II visited Ermenonville in 1777, and which was continued by Emperor Franz II (r.1792–1835), a passionate gardener. These phases created one of the most spectacular romantic gardens in Central Europe, enriched by a wealth of follies.

This book chronicles these developments by careful analysis of each stage, using plans and drawings by various designers, and a wide range of artist’s impressions, which are well reproduced. The connections with leading international garden designers of the time are well illustrated. Together with an accessibly written scholarly text by a series of specialists, and an extensive appendix with transcriptions of original sources, this volume provides an impressive document that must be consulted by anyone interested in the interpretation and representation of the English landscape garden in Europe.

Jan Woudstra
Department of Landscape, University of Sheffield

35:1 (Summer 2007)

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Restoring American Gardens: An Encyclopedia of Heirloom Ornamental Plants, 1640–1940

Charles Boot — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:55:19 +0000

Denise Wiles Adams, Restoring American Gardens: An Encyclopedia of Heirloom Ornamental Plants, 1640–1940 (Portland: Timber, 2004), 419 pp., illus. in colour and black-and-white, £29.99 (hbk), ISBN 0-88192-619-1

Accurate period garden restoration is probably not at the top of many Americans’ to-do lists. While most American heritage organizations are concerned with the historical accuracy of the landscapes and gardens at the properties they own, the idea of creating a garden consonant with the date of a privately owned house is not yet popularly practised. Not withstanding the This Old House phenomenon in the USA, which jump-started recent regeneration schemes and heightened the profile of historic conservation, treating a landscape historically is still uncommon (even, I might add, on This Old House).

Denise Wiles Adams’s Restoring American Gardens may not signal a change in this trend; however, it is an important contribution in that direction. As the subtitle notes, the largest section of Adams’s book is an encyclopaedia of historic plants. But the book also includes sixty pages of introduction to the subject of historic garden restoration and, importantly, advice on how to go about researching the history of a particular garden that advocates careful notation of what still exists on the ground and in the current plantings. She is careful to remind that there are some regional differences among design practices, but particularly between regional plant choices since climates in the USA vary widely; she deals with such regional differences in a separate section of the introduction. She also offers information about historic gardening styles throughout the country and also how to choose a design appropriate to the period and architecture of a particular house. Although Adams spends very little time on the very earliest US periods, that may be appropriate since fewer of those structures exist than, for example, nineteenth-century houses or 1930s suburban architecture, both of which are prominent in her text.

Adams includes approximately one thousand ornamental plants in the encyclopaedia: trees, shrubs, vines, perennials, tropicals, annuals, bulbs, and a separate section on heirloom roses. Unlike bare lists found in books such as Anne Leighton’s American Gardens books or the Favretti’s Landscapes and Gardens for Historic Buildings (1978), Adams gives a variety of information for each plant she includes. Common names, heirloom varieties, introduction dates, historic descriptions of the plant’s design uses and historic availability are represented for each plant. For some plants she even gives dates of introduction for various cultivars, though that information is not included for many of the plants, nor for all cultivars of a given plant. Particularly helpful is the section on heirloom roses. Many photographs and nineteenth-century illustrations make identifying these roses possible; synonyms are also given for rose cultivars so that one can track the different names one cultivar might have.

The appendices give contemporary as well as historic commercial sources for the plants in the encyclopedia, and lists the plants regionally by period of use. Importantly, there is also a list of invasives and the regional recommendations for handling existing plants which also offers potential alternatives.

Adams’s book is a very useful tool for Americans wanting to create an historically inflected garden at their own property with attention to which plants were actually grown and what their design uses were. No doubt purists for historical accuracy will be put off by Adams’s suggestion that ‘the new owner of an 1840s Greek Revival home in Ohio’s Western Reserve might like to grow a few appropriate plants, combining them in a mixed period design to enhance the architecture’ without a comprehensive design plan. Those interested in perfectly accurate garden restoration will need to augment the information collected here, but Adams’s bibliography and her persuasive use of historical materials are excellent starting points. An important function of Adams’s book is to underscore the possibility of planting historically accurate gardens in the USA. The American understanding of garden restoration undeniably lags behind that in Britain, but Restoring American Gardens shows that the information is accessible should one wish to find it. No doubt, implementing such information will only become easier and more accurate because of work like Adams’s.

Erika Mae Olbricht
Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University

35:1 (Summer 2007)

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Italian Gardens: A Cultural History

Charles Boot — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:48:10 +0000

Helena Attlee, Italian Gardens: A Cultural History (London: Frances Lincoln, 2006), 240 pp., illus. in colour and black-and-white, £30.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780711226470

This is an enjoyable book to handle, packed with fine illustrations, which at once must excite and encourage every garden-minded person to delve more deeply into the cultural history of Italian gardens. It is written with inspiring prose that lays out a clear foundation to the dominant themes and preoccupations of Italian gardeners through the centuries.

The book begins with the foundation of Renaissance thinking, emphasizing Petrarch and Leon Battista Alberti in particular, which develops the programme for the Medici gardens of the early sixteenth century on the outskirts of Florence. Helena Attlee unfolds a visual description of their landscapes against a clear analysis of the powerful symbolic associations — the complex iconography of the humanist imagination. This approach is the key to her subsequent development of the Renaissance garden. Broadly the sequence of the chapters takes the gardens chronologically, but within that the groupings are both stylistic and thematic. The Villa d’Este and the Villa Lante are given full coverage in the High Renaissance, as they deserve, and the mannerist gardens, the Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo in particular, are in the following section, although they were planned and executed in parallel during the second half of the sixteenth century. The vigorous and commanding Baroque follows with such splendid, but less well-known examples, as the Villa Cetinale near Siena and the Villa Barbarigo in the Veneto. Especially exciting is the revelation of the illusions made by manipulation of the perspective at the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati. From the eighteenth century on it becomes clear how the stage for Italian gardens becomes increasingly international with the dominance of such key figures as André Le Nôtre from France and, finally, the influence of the English Landscape Garden. European fashions in the nineteenth century are followed by a final section on the twentieth century with an emphasis on the expatriate English and Americans who manifested their love affair with Italy by rejuvenating the Renaissance garden, of which the Italians seem to have lost sight. Bernard Berenson’s garden at Villa I Tatti and Sir Harold Acton’s at La Pietra, in this context, could not be ignored. Cecil Pinsent and, more recently, Russell Page are both covered with reference to specific commissions.

Interspersed with this narrative thread there are notable and pertinent sections, one dealing with the expanding horticultural world in the seventeenth century and the resulting impact on Italian plant collections. This flourishing horticultural climate was felt throughout Europe but English views of Italian gardens have been inclined to overlook the passion and excitement that horticulture engendered there. Another is the delightful chapter on the social role of gardens in entertaining the guests; all aspects of life seem to be catered for: love, food, wine, music, theatrical shows, spectacular naumachia and, of course, the giochi d’acqua (water jokes) so diligently and deftly managed by the hydraulic engineers.

Throughout the book Attlee has drawn on an enormous fund of knowledge, much of it from primary sources, to underpin her view of garden culture. She has illuminated her text by quotations from numerous sources; these are often contemporary with the making of the garden and bring us closer to the context and thinking at the time. In places she has chosen to invent or paraphrase the thinking of a visitor of the period as a means of bringing the experience alive — an experience which is difficult for us to grasp from today’s vision. This device is used very effectively in the case of the Villa della Torre in the Veneto that was built to subvert classicism with the mannerist style. The appreciation of the design is seen through the eyes of a fictional young architect, versed in the vocabulary of Vitruvius, as he explores the villa and begins to take note that all is not what is seems to be. Elsewhere the author encourages the reader literally to become the visitor and take the path or climb the stairs and see the scene as if it was set before us.

To stimulate our imagination the first half of the book is peppered with fine contemporary paintings and engravings, which along with the photographs are the tools by which we can develop the vision of what it was like to be there and, in some cases of course, the gardens still survive with the ground plan intact, as for example at the Villa Lante. The landscape section and beyond is devoid of bird’s-eye views, but for good reasons, as this form of representation went out of fashion — the overall plan of the gardens is, therefore, much more difficult to grasp in these sections.

Special note must be made of the photographs by Alex Ramsay which are of high quality and speak of a long association with, and appreciation of, the subject-matter. They run beautifully alongside the relevant text so that endless turning of pages to find the appropriate illustration is unnecessary. Moreover, the book includes a very useful guide to gardens to visit and a helpful bibliography.

It is clear from an early perusal of this book that it is selective, choosing only to deal with the key gardens which make up a convincing cultural history. This is to its advantage, while some other books published over the last twenty years have looked more widely at the subject and inevitably covered some gardens in greater depth. Attlee’s study therefore will be of lasting value as it encompasses a sympathetic and lively overview to which it will always be a delight to return.

Robin Whalley

35:1 (Summer 2007)

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Sanderson Miller and His Landscapes

Charles Boot — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:39:55 +0000

Jennifer Meir, Sanderson Miller and His Landscapes (Chichester: Phillimore, 2006), xii + 260 pp., illus. in colour and black-and-white, £30.00 (hbk), ISBN 1-86077-387-7

Until recently Sanderson Miller has been seen as a minor figure in the eighteenth-century landscape scene, with his name usually eliciting the response, ‘oh, yes, ruined castles’. But there was much more to him than that, and study of the man and his works has been gathering momentum. William Hawkes, in the footsteps of his father Neville, has studied Miller for many years, culminating in the publication of Miller’s diaries covering part of the years 1749–50 and 1756–57. Michael Cousins has researched and written on a number of sites where Miller was involved, but until now no one has attempted to consider his oeuvre as a whole in relation to the landscapes or garden settings in which his buildings were positioned.

Miller was the spiritual descendant of John Vanbrugh in recognizing the impact of Gothic and medieval buildings in a landscape. Not that his architecture was confined to Gothic, but the buildings that dominate and characterize the estates, say, of Hagley, Worcestershire, and Wimpole, Cambridgeshire, are his mock castles. As indeed with Vanbrugh, the difficulty is to determine how far (if at all) Miller contributed to the planning of the landscape as well as the design, and possibly the placing, of various garden buildings. This is the task Jennifer Meir has courageously set herself, and the results are thought-provoking, if rather heavily reliant on speculation, which the author admits.

The book is divided into an introduction, a biography of Miller, a background of history and garden history, Miller’s approach to landscaping and his ‘stylistic signature’, consideration of the properties at which he made some contribution (more than thirty-five are identified), and his connections with Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. There are some unfortunate errors, such as stating that Venus’s Vale was at the Leasowes, Worcestershire (p.53), and that the Gothic Gateway and Museum at Enville, Staffordshire, were one and the same (p.104).

The account of Radway, Warwickshire, Miller’s own property, with analysis of the costly Act of Enclosure that was involved is detailed and convincing as to Miller’s ability to create landscape of a naturalistic kind at a time (slightly pre-Brown) when the landscape garden, especially in the shires, was in its infancy. Miller is rightly hailed as a pioneer.

The extent of Miller’s involvement in the landscaping of other estates is less certain, however, and has been challenged by Cousins on the grounds of a lack of archival evidence.* However, archives do not provide all the answers, and who is to know what transpired or evolved in the course of conversation between owners, Miller and others. The designer of a landscape in many cases (unless a professional consultant was brought in) would be the owner in concert with his friends. The words of Miller’s great-grandson on Farnborough Hall, Warwickshire, illustrate this perfectly: ‘In these works Mr Holbech [the owner] was assisted by the advice and taste of his friend and neighbour Sanderson Miller, of Radway’. This does not clinch the argument for Miller’s role: if anything, it suggests that Holbech was the main designer. Meir adds the timing and proximity of Radway to support the case for Miller designing the Farnborough landscape, but concedes that he was only in his early twenties, and the argument is by no means solid. It is generally accepted, however, that Miller designed most if not all of the garden buildings there (though, again, without documentary confirmation). So it is, too, with Wroxton, Oxfordshire, and Hagley, where Miller certainly designed buildings, but hard evidence of his input as a garden designer is lacking, though advice might well have been given.

The comparison of Brown’s landscaping with Miller’s is interesting, though if Miller was not primarily responsible, then what it shows is that Brown was to some extent following fashion (rather than Miller’s work) as well as creating it. The same problem attends discussion of Miller’s landscape ‘style’ — if he was not definitely the principal designer, can we speak of such a style? There is evidence that he was concerned with the placing of buildings, and the views obtainable from them, but that does not amount to a total landscape vision.

But even if the author’s case is not totally convincing, the book does a great service in bringing attention to the similarities and connections between a number of estates, especially in the western and southern Midlands, and to minor and vanished landscapes that are little known. It paints a vivid picture of garden making in the mid-eighteenth century, and records features, trends and design impulses prevalent at the time, with explanation of how and why these gardens evolved. In these respects it is a welcome contribution to the story of the eighteenth-century garden.

Michael Symes

* Michael Cousins, ‘Book review’, Follies Magazine, 17/2 (no. 65) (2006), pp.15–16.

34:2 (Winter 2006)

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Chatsworth: A Landscape History

Charles Boot — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:29:48 +0000

John Barnatt and Tom Williamson, Chatsworth: A Landscape History (Macclesfield: Windgather, 2005), 24 pp., illus. in colour and black-and-white, £19.99 (pbk), ISBN 1- 905-11901-1

Readers will probably be familiar with Tom Williamson’s Polite Landscape: Gardens & Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Stroud, 1995), which offered a genuinely radical reappraisal not only of the history of English gardens in the eighteenth century, but also, implicitly, of the discipline of garden history itself. Now, with John Barnatt, Senior Survey Archaeologist for the Peak District National Park, Williamson has applied those methods to one of the grandest and most complex designed landscapes in Britain.

Chatsworth, Derbyshire, has been exhaustively surveyed in the past decade. Since 1996 reports have been prepared on a buildings survey; a fields, boundaries and woodland survey; archaeological surveys of the park, the moorlands and the inbye land; and a historic landscape survey of the park and gardens. Landscape management over the centuries has preserved a huge range of field archaeology; while successive stewards and, latterly, librarians and archivists have preserved a mass of archival material. Over that decade these surveys have studied the evidence exhaustively, and this book is the distillation of those data.

The result is a narrative that proceeds chronologically from the Bronze Age barrows in the park to the garden sculptures of the twenty-first century. So far, so conventional, but the book is brilliant in correlating what can be learnt from the archaeology and what can be learnt from the archives. In an Introduction which should be essential reading for all students and practitioners, the authors explain how archives and archaeology each give only partial evidence of what has happened, concluding: ‘our knowledge and understanding the past are increased exponentially when archaeological and historical approaches are combined’.

In addition, the authors insist, ‘We are not garden historians, art historians or architectural historians’. Instead, they emphasize the need for a multidisciplinary approach, and it is salutary to find what a fascinating and authoritative history of the park and gardens this approach provides. The lesson is clear: it is impossible to achieve such an understanding of the designed landscape without understanding a context that goes far beyond design.

Barnatt and Williamson range widely to understand what lies behind, or beneath, the present Chatsworth landscape. In such an extensive tract of land, in which so many people have lived and worked, it was important to understand not only landscape design and the economic and social development of the Devonshire family, but also patterns of settlement and farming, communications and industry. The great house was not an isolated entity but was the hub of, and product of, a working estate that lay around it, and I am not aware of any estate history that gives such a full picture of that interdependent relationship.

This level of understanding transforms the familiar image of Chatsworth as a work of art, created out of little more than aesthetic and cultural ideas. The designed landscape used rather than discarded the materials of the past: hedgerow trees, fields, old roads and tracks, bridges, mills, quarries, and woodlands. Successive dukes of Devonshire oversaw the closure of roads, the demolition of buildings, and the grubbing-up of hedgerows, but rarely, if ever, their obliteration – and if archaeology teaches a garden historian one thing, it is that the past is rarely if ever ‘swept away’.The book is, therefore, of great significance and interest from a methodological point of view. It is also exemplary in bringing the development of a great estate into such sharp focus. It is especially valuable in challenging myths and received non-wisdom. Edensor, the estate village, for example, was not moved wholesale from the park to a position outside to improve a prospect from the house, and it was not ‘swept away’ by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown in the eighteenth century. Nor was its partial demolition and rebuilding done at a stroke, but in two distinct projects. In addition, Barnatt and Williamson draw attention to the remarkable collection of field barns in the little enclosures west of the village, apparently built for smallholders in the village. At every turn close examination of the archaeology and archives undermines the casual history of this estate, and as ever the real history is much more complex and challenging than the myths.

The book also eschews using the big names in the house’s history — Bess of Hardwick, the 1st Duke, the 4th Duke and the 6th Duke — as stepping stones, and instead conscientiously identifies the often notable contribution of the intervening figures and, sometimes, just the quiet continuity of work, largely uncelebrated, that went on between. It pays tribute to the contribution to the garden’s development of figures previously unheralded, both celebrated, such as William Kent and Jeffrey Wyatville, and more modest, such as Brown’s foreman, Michael Millican, or John Robertson, Paxton’s architectural assistant.

In conclusion, this is essential reading not just for those interested in Chatsworth but as a model for the analysis of designed landscapes everywhere.

David Lambert

34:2 (Winter 2006)

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Henry Shaw’s Victorian Landscapes: The Missouri Botanical Garden and Tower Grove Park

Charles Boot — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:20:12 +0000

Carol Grove, Henry Shaw’s Victorian Landscapes: The Missouri Botanical Garden and Tower Grove Park (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press in association with the Library of American Landscape History, 2005), 232 pp., 145 illus. in black-andwhite, £27.95 (hbk), ISBN 1-55849-508-8

The Missouri Botanic Garden opened to the public in 1859 and is the oldest continuously operating botanic garden in the USA, now ranking with Kew as a world-renowned scientific and educational institution. Tower Grove Park is the finest Victorian urban park in America. Carol Grove, who teaches landscape studies at the University of Missouri, has written the story of their founding by Henry Shaw, born in England in 1800. Shaw grew up near Chatsworth, Derbyshire, and was educated at Mill Hill, Middlesex, on the site of eighteenth-century plant collector Peter Collinson’s botanic garden. Grove traces Shaw’s love of plants, landscape design, and architecture to these childhood associations.

In 1819 Shaw crossed the Atlantic and made his way to the pioneer town of St Louis on the Mississippi. He was a talented entrepreneur who took pleasure riding the prairie, and eventually bought land which became the site of his country home, later evolving into the Botanic Garden, and Tower Grove Park. Both were intended for the enjoyment and education of the public. At age forty, by then a rich man, Shaw returned to Britain in the first of three extended tours, which included much of Europe and Egypt, visiting gardens, parks, institutions, and Crystal Palace at The Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park, London. During this travelling decade Shaw collected art, artefacts and books — his library in St Louis included works by authors such as Humphry Repton, Joseph Paxton, Andrew Jackson Downing, John Lindley, and John Claudius Loudon. Planning his botanic garden in the 1850s Shaw consulted with William J. Hooker at Kew, and Asa Gray at Harvard, Massachusetts, who introduced him to plant collector George Engelmann. Their focus was scientific study — museum and library — but Shaw, while following Loudon’s tripartite garden/fruticetum/arboretum organization, believed the arts of gardening and architecture beneficial to society and planned, for public pleasure, a grand entrance gate, fanciful structures, and elegant planting design motifs. Shaw’s Garden opened to the public in 1859 and flourished under gardener James Gurney, who had worked with Robert Marnock at Regents Park, London, and became renowned for the cultivation and breeding of Victoria water lilies.

Shaw’s focus then turned to 289 acres of adjoining land that he donated to the city of St Louis for a public park, opened in 1872. Grove draws parallels between Birkenhead, the Derby Arboretum and Loudon’s writings on public parks to Shaw’s gardenesque concept, which contrasted with contemporary picturesque Central Park. Tower Grove Park incorporated 7 miles of paths for horse, vehicle and pedestrian; a sailboat pond with mock ruins; four entrance gates with lodges; two palm houses; a music stand encircled by busts of Shaw’s favourite composers; eleven ornamental pavilions; and seventeen thousand trees, shrubs and vines. Perimeter houses were planned, but only the model villa was built; it now serves as the Park Director’s residence.

Since his death in 1880 the Botanic Garden has changed in style, focus, and size and would be unrecognizable to Shaw today, yet it still serves his intention as a pleasurable and educational public attraction. At Tower Grove Park amenities have been added while retaining the original character and buildings. After many years of decline Tower Grove Park was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1989; and it has been much restored since. It is a rare and fine example of a nineteenthcentury public park.

Grove used Shaw’s journals, receipts, sketches, and meticulous account books recording plant habits, locations, and sources to find the character of Shaw, landscape gardener. The result is an enjoyable book about a most interesting pioneer and his contributions to public open space. Grove sets the story in the context of nineteenthcentury mid-west America, with background commentary on social, scientific and aesthetic forces on both sides of the Atlantic. For the lay reader Grove provides a primer in eighteenth- to nineteenth-century landscape history with, for example, pages devoted to plant exploration, and a lengthy discussion of picturesque and gardenesque philosophy. Landscape historians will appreciate the valuable accounts of one of the world’s most important botanic gardens, and a charming nineteenth-century public park of significance to all who are interested in landscape architecture.

The text is well supplemented by photographs and plans (unfortunately not listed) from the archives of Missouri Botanical Garden and Tower Grove Park, and recent photographs by Carol Betsch.

Liz Goodfellow

34:2 (Winter 2006)

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Solovki Garden; Russia’s Monastery, Gulag and Botanic Garden on the Edge of the Arctic Circle

Charles Boot — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:23:07 +0000

Artyom Parshim, Solovki Garden; Russia’s Monastery, Gulag and Botanic Garden on the Edge of the Arctic Circle, trans. Susan Causey (London: IBLF, 2005), 56 pp., 94 illus. in colour and black-and-white, £7.95 (pbk). Available from: IBLF Solovki Garden Project, 28 Stratford Villas, London NW1 9SG, UK

The Solovki archipelago is remotely situated in the White Sea less than 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle. The main island is a place of considerable natural beauty, densely wooded and with many lakes. A monastery was established there in the fifteenth century, and the Transfiguration Cathedral and outstanding monastic buildings of the sixteenth century still survive. A network of canals was begun in the fifteenth century and in the nineteenth century it linked more than seventy lakes. Before the First World War, many pilgrims visited Solovki each year, but monastic life ended abruptly after the Revolution in 1917 and the archipelago became a notorious gulag.

A remarkable garden was created in the nineteenth century. Thanks to a favourable microclimate, heating from a wax bleachery and considerable horticultural skills, some surprising successes under glass were reported with melons, watermelons, grapes, cucumbers, peaches and exotic flowering plants. Some of the scientists among the prisoners in the gulag were able to work on acclimatization in the garden, but many never returned to the mainland. In 1974, the Solovki Museum-Reserve took charge of the garden; and in 1984, it was listed in the register of the USSR Botanic Gardens Council as ‘the Botanic Garden of the Solovki Museum-Reserve’. An inventory in 2004 listed 147 species, forms and varieties of trees and shrubs and 255 herbaceous plants. Solovki is included in UNESCO’s list of World Heritage sites.

Artyom Parshin’s attractive small book, Solovetsky Sad, gives a fascinating account of the garden’s history and is part of the Prince of Wales Business Leaders Forum of support for sustaining Russia’s culture. Landscape architect Kim Wilkie and garden archaeologist Brian Dix have advised on the restoration. The Prince visited Solovki in 2003. The English version (Solovki Garden) is admirably translated by Susan Causey and contains fifty-six pages with many excellent colour photographs and historical illustrations.

Peter Hayden

33:1 (Summer 2005)

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A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture

Charles Boot — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:21:30 +0000

James Stevens Curl, A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 912 pp., 250 illus., £25.00 (hbk). ISBN 0192806300

James Stevens Curl’s A Dictionary of Architecture was first published in 1999; this revised edition, apart from updating various entries, has considerably expanded its treatment of garden and landscape design, and thus earned the extension of the title. There are fewer garden designers and landscape architects than architects in these pages, but the major figures, from Henry Wise to Peter Shepheard, are to be found. The most unfortunate omission is William Andrews Nesfield, who is not named even in the entry devoted to his son William Eden. Peter Josef Lenné, Johann Conrad Sckell and Fredrik Magnus Piper are in, but not Gabriel Thouin. As for architects, the entry on James Fergusson does not mention the Marianne North Gallery, and I was sorry not to see an entry on Blunden Shadbolt; but I was pleased to see Canadians such as Samuel Maclure, Francis Mawson Rattenbury, Francis Swales and Arthur Erickson included, and the inclusion of Arnold Mitchell is a cause for celebration. Stylistic terms will prove more controversial than personal entries, and the treatment of ‘picturesque’ (both in that entry, and in the relevant biographical entries) will provide fodder for dispute.

A great merit of this book is the quality of the illustrations. Anyone seeking a handy guide to bricks and brick bonds, explanations of the classical Orders or Gothic period styles, or the component parts of an arch, will find admirably clear and economically executed diagrams.

As a reference guide for historians of landscape architecture, it inevitably suffers by comparison with Patrick Taylor’s The Oxford Companion to the Garden (Oxford, 2006), which appeared almost simultaneously, and which, of course, is entirely devoted to what is strictly a subordinate aspect of Curl’s book. I suspect that garden historians will find A Dictionary of Architecture most useful as a reference tool for looking up architects who occasionally wander into our visual field. But its greatest value might lie in the other direction: it will no doubt be used extensively by architects and architectural historians, and the constant reminders that the settings of buildings also have a history and a hall of fame for designers can only be salutary.

Brent Elliott
Royal Horticultural Society Lindley Library

34:1 (Summer 2006)

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